The Nine-Tailed Fox and the Scholar

What Korea's written record and the 27,588 items of its national oral archive do not contain is the story usually told under this title: a fox who marries a travelling scholar and must hide her nature for a hundred nights, or a thousand, or until she has taken a hundred livers. The modern plot of a fox wife on a countdown has a first datable appearance on television, on 10 July 1979. The one script of it that a critic has been able to read, for the remake broadcast on 7 July 1997, has no scholar in it: the husband is Chilbok, a poor country bachelor, and the term is ten years.

Korea has a nine-tailed fox and Korea has scholars. The modern plot that pairs a fox wife with a countdown — a fox who marries a man and will become human if she is not found out before the term runs out — has a first datable appearance, and it is on television, on 10 July 1979. In the one version of that script its critic has been able to read, the husband is a poor country bachelor, and the term is ten years. Begin with the word. Gumiho, written 九尾狐, arrives in Korea as a Chinese term, and it arrives pointing back at Korea. In the classics that Korean scholars read, the nine-tailed fox belongs to Qingqiu: Guo Pu glosses Qingqiu as a mountain beyond the sea from which the nine-tailed fox comes, Fu Qian places the country of Qingqiu three hundred li east of the sea, and Kong Zhao says flatly that Qingqiu is a place name in Haedong, east of the sea. The line the Korean classical databases return most often is the tribute line: King Wen obtained the nine-tailed fox, and the Eastern Yi submitted. In every one of these it is Chinese authors writing about an animal that comes from the direction of Korea. What Korea's own written record does with the word is unexpected, and it can be counted. A full-text search of 九尾狐 across the classical-sources tier of the Academy of Korean Studies' integrated platform returns 43 hits. Almost none of them is a story. In the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty the phrase is an insult. The obituary of Jeong Yi-han, governor of Pyeongan Province, in Danjong sillok 6 (1453), ends with a couplet: his craftiness was a nine-tailed fox, his venom a two-headed snake — and the compilers add their own gloss, "a fox with nine tails; a creature that bewitches people". In Myeongjong sillok 28 (1562), an official who has attached himself to the strongman Yi Ryang is a man "whom people eye sidelong and point at, calling him a nine-tailed fox". In Sukjong sillok 4 (1675), Yi Ok's flattery is beyond compare, and "people called him a nine-tailed fox". In Yeongjo sillok 115 (1770) the king says it to a prisoner's face: even executed by law, the man is "no more than a nine-tailed fox". Earlier still, Yi Gyu-bo (1168–1241) uses the same figure in his Poem on the Old Shaman, written to celebrate an order expelling shamans from the capital: the woman who gathers crowds east of his house, he says, is if not the thousand-year rat of the burrow, then surely the nine-tailed fox of the grove. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vernacular court novels use it the same way, against scheming women. Across the 43 hits there is no fox who marries a scholar. Korea does have a fox and a scholar, and it is older and stranger than the modern plot. In Book Four of the Samguk yusa, compiled around 1281, the monk Iryeon copies out the life of Wongwang from an old manuscript of the Suijeon then kept by a retired local officer in Gyeongju. Wongwang takes orders, and at thirty withdraws alone to Mount Samgi. Four years later a second monk settles nearby and practises loud incantations. A voice speaks to Wongwang in the night, praises his discipline, complains about the noise and asks him to move the neighbour on. Wongwang passes the message, and the neighbour laughs it off with the sentence that decides this entry: "How can a master of the Dharma trouble himself over the words of a fox spirit?" The spirit answers by bringing the mountain down on the man's hermitage overnight, and then explains itself: "My years are close to three thousand, and my powers are at their height." It tells Wongwang that piety in one valley is worth nothing, sends him to China, and gives him the plan for the journey. He stays eleven years, masters the Buddhist canon and Confucian learning too, and returns in 600. Coming back to thank the spirit, he asks to see its true shape and is shown an enormous arm reaching through the cloud — which is why, the text says, the valley is called Bijangsan, Long-Arm Mountain. The spirit then announces its own death and asks him to come and see it off. On the appointed day Wongwang finds one old black fox, black as lacquer, panting; it stops breathing and dies. Wongwang went on to draft the Silla king's petition for Sui troops, died at eighty-four and was buried west of Myeonghwal Fortress. The annotators of the National Institute of Korean History place Mount Samgi in Duryu-ri, Angang-eup, in modern Gyeongju, and identify it with Geumgok-san, where Geumgoksa holds Wongwang's memorial stupa. That is a fox and a scholar, and it is the oldest one Korea has. The fox has no nine tails and marries nobody; it advises the scholar, sends him to China, and dies of old age with him as witness. The oral record was gathered late and it can be searched. The Academy of Korean Studies' Compendium of Korean Oral Literature — collected in a first campaign from 1979 and a second from 2008 — holds 27,588 narrative items. Thirty-eight of them contain the word gumiho. Reading the list is the argument: the fox is exposed and killed by Kang Gam-chan, by Jiang Ziya, by Bak Mun-su, by a salt pedlar's staff, by a hunting dog, by a three-legged dog. In "The King's Daughter-in-Law is a Gumiho", recorded from Bae Gil-hwan, aged 67, at Unjeong 1-dong in Byeokjin-myeon, Seongju County, on 4 May 1979, the fox has married into a royal house and is eating one minister a night; her face is covered with a cloth, she is clubbed on the back of the head, a nine-tailed fox drops dead and the kingdom is at peace. In "The Maiden Who Detected a Gumiho by Chinese Verse", recorded from Jeong Jin-hyeon, aged 63, at Sajik-dong in Cheongju on 5 November 1980, the thousand-year fox of Mount Taebaek takes the shape of a beautiful young man and courts the daughter of a scholar named Yi; the father and mother are charmed and the daughter is not; she sets the suitor a couplet, and the fox travels to China and digs up Li Bai's grave to get the answering line; she then borrows the best hunting dog in the district, and the dog kills it. Here the fox is the suitor, the learning is the weapon used against it, and the person who sees through it is the bride. The one item in the whole archive titled "The Gumiho Bride", recorded from Yi Sun-rye at Buk-myeon in Inje County, Gangwon Province, in April 2013, survives as audio only: the archive record says there is no transcript. The motifs of the modern plot do exist in Korea, but they belong to other tales. The hundred men come from the fox-bead type — number 258 in Choi In-hak's Korean type index, as Kim Hwan-hee reports after working through it — in which a schoolboy meets a beautiful woman on his way to the village school and they pass a bead between their mouths until he sickens; in one of the two branches described by Cho Hui-ung, the fox-woman is working through a hundred students. The livers come from the fox-sister type, in which a daughter obtained by prayer turns out to be a fox and empties the family's byre. Even that is not fixed: in "The Fox Sister", recorded from Yi Ok-ji at Seolcheon-myeon in Namhae County on 24 January 2011, she eats the horses whole, one a night, and then the parents, and the brother comes home three years later to a house with human bones in every corner. The countdown and the marriage arrive from somewhere else. On 10 July 1979 KBS broadcast an episode of Jeonseol-ui gohyang (Hometown of Legends) called "Gumiho", scripted by Im Chung, with Han Hye-suk as the fox. The folklorist Kim Hwan-hee, who has gone through the collections and the type indexes looking for its plot, calls it flatly a created legend rather than a transmitted one: the motifs were pulled from Korean and foreign tales and the narrative was newly assembled, and what it drew on most is not Korean at all but Lafcadio Hearn's "Yuki-Onna" — a supernatural wife, a promise, a night when the husband speaks, and a wife who vanishes for ever. Kim writes that the episode was expanded and reproduced across media for the next forty years; in 2010 the Korea TV and Radio Writers Association found that the first episode of the drama Gumiho: Yeowoo Nuidyeon had partly plagiarised Im Chung's script. Yonhap traced the line in 2020 from Han Hye-suk to Lee Dong-wook: simple horror, then melodrama, then romantic comedy. The hundred livers and the thousand days are the grammar of that television line, and they change from production to production because nothing anchors them.

The pin for this entry is on Geumgoksa, a small temple in Duryu-ri, Angang-eup, in the north of Gyeongju. It marks the setting of the oldest documented Korean encounter between a fox spirit and a man of learning, the Mount Samgi episode of the Samguk yusa, in which the fox spirit speaks to the monk Wongwang. Kim Hwan-hee, whose essays this entry follows on the modern tale of the fox and the scholar, reports that she found no collected version matching its plot, so that tale has no place of its own to pin. The annotators of the National Institute of Korean History identify Mount Samgi with Geumgok-san in Duryu-ri (Angang-eup), and they note, citing Jeong Yeong-ho's article of 1973, that the temple of Geumgoksa on that mountain holds Wongwang's stupa. The Korea Heritage Service lists the Stupa of Wongwangbeopsa at the Geumgoksa Site as a Gyeongsangbuk-do cultural heritage material, designated on 5 August 1985. Its address is 9-1 Duryu-ri; it is state-owned and managed by Gyeongju City. By our own calculation the pin is about 9.8 km north-north-west of Gyeongju City Hall and about 7.4 km south-west of the centre of Angang-eup. The Samguk yusa says Wongwang was buried west of Myeonghwal Fortress. The institute's note places the fortress on the summit of Myeonghwalsan, between the Cheongun-dong and Bomun-dong districts, about 3.5 km east-south-east of City Hall. The documents behind this entry can be read online. The Samguk yusa passage is in the National Institute of Korean History's database as record sy_004r_0010_0010_0050, in Korean translation with the annotations cited above. The Compendium of Korean Oral Literature is published on the Academy of Korean Studies' platform. On 24 September 2026 its introduction described the 85 volumes of the 1980s campaign, drawn from more than 4,000 informants in some sixty cities and counties, and gave the narrative holding as 27,588 tales. The thirty-eight records containing "gumiho" that this entry relies on are consulted there, including the two quoted in the history. The same platform's classical-sources search for 九尾狐, which returned 43 records on 16 August 2026, returned 44 on 24 September 2026.